Philosophy: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 4

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DrivePhilosophy

Leave nothing for tomorrow which can be done today.

The line comes from notes Lincoln wrote for a lecture to young lawyers; his secretaries John Nicolay and John Hay dated them 1850, perhaps too early, and no one knows if he gave the talk. After admitting “I am not an accomplished lawyer”, he names diligence as the leading rule of every calling, then urges lawyers to keep up with their letters, to persuade neighbours to compromise and, above all, to be honest. The advice is old: Lord Chesterfield wrote the same to his son in 1749.

Abraham LincolnRead card

DrivePhilosophy

Imagination means nothing without doing.

The official Charlie Chaplin website gives Chaplin's own handwritten notes as the source of this line; it is sometimes tied, wrongly, to his 1940 New York Times article defending The Great Dictator. The sentence fits how he worked. Until The Great Dictator, Chaplin never filmed from a finished script: he had sets built, tried ideas out in front of the camera and reshot until scenes worked. On The Kid (1921) he shot 53 takes for every one he used.

Charlie ChaplinRead card

DrivePhilosophy

Let us strive for the impossible. The great achievements throughout history have been the conquest of what seemed the impossible.

Chaplin sent these words by telephone from Hollywood to a rally in Madison Square Park, New York, on 22 July 1942. The crowd was demanding a “second front”: an Allied landing in Western Europe to relieve the Soviet Union, which was bearing most of the land war against Germany. Chaplin urged people in factories, fields and uniform to aim for victory in the spring, and ended with this line. The landings came in Normandy in June 1944. His wartime campaigning later fed claims that he was a communist.

Charlie ChaplinRead card

DrivePhilosophy

Nothing is permanent in this wicked world, not even our troubles.

Chaplin says this as the title character of Monsieur Verdoux (1947), a black comedy he wrote and directed from an idea by Orson Welles. Verdoux, a French bank clerk out of work, supports his family by marrying wealthy widows and murdering them. One rainy night he brings home a Belgian refugee just out of prison, meaning to test a new poison on her. He offers her this consolation; later, moved by her story of the war-wounded husband she cared for, he swaps her wine and sends her off with money.

Charlie ChaplinRead card

DrivePhilosophy

It is always brave to say what everyone thinks.

The line is credited to Georges Duhamel (1884–1966), the French doctor and novelist who served as an army surgeon in the First World War and won the Prix Goncourt in 1918, but no one has found where he wrote it. Psychologists call the silence behind it pluralistic ignorance: each person privately doubts an idea but assumes everyone else accepts it, so no one speaks. In a 1993 Princeton study, Deborah Prentice and Dale Miller found most students less comfortable with heavy drinking than they believed their peers were.

Georges DuhamelRead card

DrivePhilosophy

Look at your habits. Were they shaped by countless small acts of cowardice and laziness, or by your courage and inventive reason?

This is section 308 of The Gay Science, a book of short numbered passages that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) published in 1882 and expanded in 1887. The section, in the book's fourth part, is headed “The history of each day”. It asks what your days are made of, and answers: your habits. After the question on the card comes the twist. However different the two kinds of life are, other people might praise both equally, and you might be just as useful to them either way. Praise, usefulness and respectability, Nietzsche says, may be enough for someone who only wants a good conscience, but not for you, who search hearts and know what a conscience is.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), §308, 'The history of each day'; English and Turkish independently renderedRead card

DrivePhilosophy

Nothing helps. I must help myself, or I am finished.

Nietzsche wrote this on 22 February 1883 from Rapallo, on the Italian coast, to his loyal friend Franz Overbeck, a theologian at the University of Basel. He was very ill: his stomach could no longer take even sleeping draughts, and his nights were sleepless and tormented. His friendship with Lou Salomé had ended painfully the year before, and Richard Wagner, once his closest friend and later his opponent, had died in Venice nine days earlier. In the letter Nietzsche calls Wagner the fullest human being he ever knew, says the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra should already be at the printer's, and cries out: “No! This life! And I am the advocate of life!” He planned to move to Genoa, seek his health in strict solitude and go to the mountains when the season allowed. The card's sentence comes straight after these plans.

Friedrich NietzscheRead card

DrivePhilosophy

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

The saying comes from chapter 64 of the Tao Te Ching, the classic of Taoist philosophy traditionally credited to the sage Laozi; its oldest surviving copies date from around 300 BC. Literally, a journey of a thousand li begins beneath your feet; the li is a Chinese measure of distance, today half a kilometre. The same chapter notes that a tree too thick to hug grows from a tiny shoot: great things start small, and are best dealt with while they are still small.

Chinese, Daoist ProverbRead card

StillnessLiterature

The wound is where the light enters you.

The sentence condenses lines by Coleman Barks, the American poet whose free versions made Rumi a bestseller in English; Barks did not read Persian and reworked scholarly translations. His poem “Childhood Friends” (1990) urges the reader to keep looking at “the bandaged place”, where the light enters. It draws on the Masnavi of Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic of Konya, who tells the wounded not to turn away from the plaster a spiritual guide lays on them: the healing comes from its light, not from themselves.

Attributed to Rumi; exact English sentence not matched to a standard textRead card

DrivePhilosophy

The tongue has no bones, but it can break hearts.

The older form of this proverb says the tongue has no bones, yet it breaks bones: words can hurt as much as blows. An Italian-English dictionary of 1760 gives it as “La lingua non ha osso, e osso fa rompere”; Greek has it too, and the Ottoman statesman and scholar Ahmed Vefik Pasha recorded “Dilin kemiği yok, kemiği kırar” in his 19th-century collection of Turkish proverbs. Swahili says simply “Ulimi hauna mfupa”, the tongue has no bone. The ending about hearts seems to be a later English variant.

Persian, Turkish, Arabic variants ProverbRead card

StillnessLiterature

The rose's lover must endure the thorn.

The Turkish Language Association's dictionary explains that people put up with the troubles that come with someone, or some work, they love. The rose and its thorn are an old pair in Turkish and Persian poetry; in classical Ottoman verse the nightingale longs for the rose, and the thorn often stands for the pain of love. English has “No rose without a thorn”, as does Turkish, “Dikensiz gül olmaz”, but this proverb adds that whoever loves the rose accepts its thorn.

Turkish, Persian variants ProverbRead card

DrivePhilosophy

He who has health has hope, and he who has hope has everything.

English quotation books have called this an “Arabian proverb” since at least the 1860s; Tryon Edwards's A Dictionary of Thoughts (1891) is one, but these books give no Arabic original, so the label is best taken loosely. The idea is widely shared: good health gives people the strength to plan and to recover from setbacks. Turkish says “Her şeyin başı sağlık”, health comes first, and when a glass breaks people say “Sağlık olsun”: never mind, as long as everyone is well.

Spanish, Arabic variants ProverbRead card

DrivePhilosophy

A single bracelet does not jingle.

The proverb is usually labelled Congolese, though the books that cite it do not say which of the region's many languages it comes from; Charlotte and Wolf Leslau's collection African Proverbs (1962) lists it with no origin. The image is simple: one bangle on a wrist makes no sound, and the jingle comes only when it meets another. It is a saying about working together. American books on Kwanzaa, the African-American festival held from 26 December to 1 January, use it to illustrate umoja, Swahili for unity.

Proverb attributed to the CongoRead card

DrivePhilosophy

Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.

The pairing is usually called a Japanese proverb, but no Japanese original has been found. It appears in English-language business books from the mid-1990s; “vision” here means a clear idea of where you want to get to. An older saying on the same theme was already in church papers in the 1920s: “A vision without a task is but a dream; a task without a vision is drudgery.” It is often said to come from an 18th-century English church inscription, but that is unconfirmed too.

Anonymous saying; widely circulated as a Japanese proverb, with no specific Japanese source identifiedRead card

DrivePhilosophy

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and you feed him for life.

Often called an ancient Chinese proverb, the saying has no known Chinese source. Its earliest known version is in Mrs Dymond (1885), a novel by Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie, daughter of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray: give a man a fish and he is hungry again in an hour; teach him to catch one and you do him a good turn. “Feed him for a lifetime” appears by 1961. The idea is older: the 12th-century Jewish scholar Maimonides ranked highest the help that lets a poor person support himself.

Chinese, widely attributed ProverbRead card

DrivePhilosophy

Better to light one candle than curse the darkness.

The saying is often called Chinese or credited to Confucius, but its earliest known version is English. In a sermon published in 1907, the Methodist preacher William L. Watkinson warned that angry speeches against evil come easier than good works: it is better to light the candle than to curse the darkness. That year the sermon was reprinted in China's Millions, a missionary magazine, perhaps explaining the Chinese label. The Christophers, a Catholic movement, took it as their motto, and in 1962 Adlai Stevenson used it to praise Eleanor Roosevelt.

Anonymous saying; earliest documented close form located in William L. Watkinson (1907)Read card

DrivePhilosophy

A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.

John Barrymore (1882–1942), nicknamed “the Great Profile”, was one of the most celebrated American actors of his day: his Hamlet on Broadway in 1922 and in London in 1925 led critics to call him the greatest living American tragedian, and he later starred in films such as Grand Hotel (1932). The line comes from Good Night, Sweet Prince, the biography his friend Gene Fowler wrote after his death, where it is introduced with “Barrymore once said”. Fowler took the title from Horatio's farewell to the dying Hamlet.

Attributed to John Barrymore; reported by Gene Fowler in Good Night, Sweet Prince (1943)Read card

DrivePhilosophy

While there is life, there is hope.

The Roman statesman Cicero quotes this as a common saying in a letter to his friend Atticus in 49 BC, during the civil war between Caesar and Pompey: as people say of a sick man, while there is breath there is hope, and so, as long as Pompey was in Italy, he had not given up. The shorter Latin Dum spiro, spero, “while I breathe, I hope”, is of unknown origin; it is the motto of South Carolina and of St Andrews in Scotland.

Latin, Roman ProverbRead card

StillnessLiterature

In every religion there is love, yet love has no religion.

This sentence has not been found in Rumi's writings, but it echoes a story in his Masnavi, the long Persian poem he dictated in Konya. Moses hears a shepherd offering, in homely words, to mend God's shoes, comb his hair and bring him milk. Moses scolds him, and God rebukes Moses: he was sent to bring people closer, not to drive them away. God's answer includes the line “The religion of love is apart from all religions.” When Rumi died in 1273, Christians and Jews joined his mourners.

Rumi (popular attribution)Read card

DrivePhilosophy

A crooked tree lives its own life, but a straight tree is turned into wood.

No Chinese original of this wording has been traced; the idea comes from the Zhuangzi, a classic of Chinese philosophy from the 4th and 3rd centuries BC. In one story a carpenter walks past a giant oak by a village shrine without a glance, because its timber is useless. That night the tree appears in his dream: being useless, it says, has kept it alive. Another chapter says it plainly: “The straight tree is felled first.” Turkish has a similar saying: people throw stones at the tree that bears fruit.

Chinese proverbRead card

StillnessLiterature

Do not waste your life trying to solve the sky. No one came back with the answer. Sit, breathe, and taste this hour.

A modern verse inspired by the Rubáiyát, not a translation of Omar Khayyam. Khayyam (1048–1131) was a Persian mathematician and astronomer from Nishapur who led the team behind the Jalali calendar, the basis of Iran's calendar today. Four-line poems, rubáiyát, were credited to him after his death, and how many are really his is still debated. The verse echoes Edward FitzGerald's famous English version: of all who passed through “the door of Darkness”, “Not one returns to tell us of the Road”.

Modern verse after the Rubáiyát of Omar KhayyamRead card

StillnessReligion & Belief

The wise argue about heaven and hell. The cup in your hand asks a simpler question: are you awake to this moment?

A modern verse inspired by the Rubáiyát, the four-line poems credited to the Persian poet Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), not a translation. Its contrast between learned debate and the cup in hand runs through Edward FitzGerald's English version. In one quatrain the young poet eagerly hears scholars and holy men argue, “but evermore / Came out by the same door where in I went”. In another he sends his soul to bring back news of the afterlife, and it answers: “I Myself am Heav'n and Hell.”

Modern verse after the Rubáiyát of Omar KhayyamRead card

StillnessLiterature

The clay cup was once a living hand, a laughing mouth, a lover's face. Hold it gently. Everything returns to earth.

A modern verse inspired by the Rubáiyát, the four-line poems credited to the Persian poet Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), not a translation. Its image is one of the best known in those poems: the potter's clay is the dust of people who once lived. In one Persian quatrain a jug was once a lover, and its handle an arm around a beloved's neck. Edward FitzGerald's English version of 1859 has a whole “Book of Pots”, and a lump of wet clay that murmurs to the potter: “Gently, Brother, gently, pray!”

Modern verse after the Rubáiyát of Omar KhayyamRead card

StillnessLiterature

Do not let tomorrow steal today. Even a promised paradise can become an excuse for missing the life in front of you.

A modern verse inspired by the Rubáiyát, the four-line poems credited to the Persian poet Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), not a translation. Edward FitzGerald's English version of 1859 asks why we should fret about “Unborn TO-MORROW and dead YESTERDAY” if today is sweet. A later edition answers those who sigh for paradise: “Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go”, meaning the pleasure in hand, not a promise. FitzGerald even jokes that Khayyam, who helped reform the calendar, only struck tomorrow and yesterday out of it.

Modern verse after the Rubáiyát of Omar KhayyamRead card